A Journal for Men & Women
Raise the question of “women’s roles” among conservative Christians and you will send almost all the men scurrying for cover. So dominant are certain feminist assertions—that, left on their own, men will mistreat women and that the Christian tradition as we have it is the work of men left on their own—that men who are not guilty of a single chauvinist thought will grovel as much as they must to prove their innocence and enlightenment.
Even those who hold to the New Testament teaching on the headship of men tend to grant the feminist claims in every other way. Many will not use man and he generically, and we even see, once in a while, the hitherto unimaginable sight of very conservative men avoiding he when speaking of the Father and the Son and especially the allegedly genderless Holy Spirit. When they have to say they oppose women being put into positions of headship, they almost always add some qualifying phrase like “but I certainly don’t mean to say that women are inferior,” as if holding the biblical view were in itself evidence of misogyny.
A few weeks ago one of our readers, an old friend with some status in the wider world, wrote me to complain that Touchstone ran only male writers and “operates [on] a male-only basis.” In our articles “all references to Christians are always ‘he,’ never ‘she,’” and even my essay on “Imaginative Orthodoxy” “addresse[d] a male-only readership” because I called my readers “modern men.” For these reasons—the relative lack of women writers and the use of generic language—women don’t “rate in your pages.” In Touchstone, “Male is normative, female is exceptional.”
THIS ARTICLE ONLY AVAILABLE TO SUBSCRIBERS.
FOR QUICK ACCESS:
David Mills has been editor of Touchstone and executive editor of First Things.
subscription options
Order
Print/Online Subscription
Get six issues (one year) of Touchstone PLUS full online access including pdf downloads for only $39.95. That's only $3.34 per month!
Order
Online Only
Subscription
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95. That's only $1.66 per month!
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more from the online archives
8.4—Fall 1995
The Demise of Biblical Preaching
Distortions of the Gospel and its Recovery by Donald G. Bloesch
31.6—November/December 2018
on the Church's Response to the Anti-marriage Tide by Diane Woerner
17.4—May 2004
The Unhappy & Abusive Marriage of Liberalism & Modernism by James Hitchcock
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
